Abstract
The Hobbesian contractarian is one who evaluates a legal, economic or political system by determining whether it is the sort of arrangement upon which the affected individuals could have come to agreement through a bargaining effort in which each is fully aware of everyone’s individual preferences and powers and each is concerned to maximize the satisfaction of his own interests. By this method of moral accounting, a social system is justified if and only if it is justifiable to each individual in that system by showing it to be mutually advantageous vis-a-vis a move to anarchy or to any other feasible social system. Today the most provocative reworking of the Hobbesian method of evaluation is being carried out by North American economists and philosophers incorporating into it central ideas of economics and the theory of games. My concern is to utilize the semiotical program of Charles Morris in analyzing the logic of the prescriptions of the new Hobbesian contractarian ethics.2
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© 1987 Plenum Press, New York
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Charron, W.C. (1987). The Prescriptions of the New Hobbesian Contractarian. In: Kevelson, R. (eds) Law and Semiotics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0959-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0959-8_5
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